Ethics in Poetry Retranslation After Analogical Form Gregary Racz [email protected]

Long Island University Digital Commons @ LIU Faculty of Foreign Languages Publications Connoly College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences 2013 No Anxiety of Influence: Ethics in Poetry Retranslation after Analogical Form Gregary Racz [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.liu.edu/brooklyn_forlfpub Part of the Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons, and the Translation Studies Commons Recommended Citation Racz, Gregary, "No Anxiety of Influence: Ethics in Poetry Retranslation after Analogical Form" (2013). Faculty of Foreign Languages Publications. 1. https://digitalcommons.liu.edu/brooklyn_forlfpub/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Connoly College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences at Digital Commons @ LIU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty of Foreign Languages Publications by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ LIU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. No Anxiety of Influence: Ethics in Poetry Retranslation after Analogical Form Gregary J. Racz Long Island University—Brooklyn Retranslation as a Topic in Translation Studies Retranslation, the second or subsequent rendering of a ST into the same TL, is hardly uncharted territory in the Translation Studies canon, but its scattershot treatment reveals little critical consensus among theorists and practitioners. Consider, for starters, the fundamental question of feasibility and need. “I believe firmly in new translations for every generation,” James S Holmes states in what may well be, under ideal circumstances, the majority opinion (Holmes, 1989: 72), while J. M Cohen’s time frame for successive renderings is more leisurely. “Every great book demands to be re-translated once in a century,” he writes, citing a reason that finds a host of proponents in the prevailing climate of TT assimilation, viz., “to suit the change in standards and taste of new generations, which will differ radically from those of the past” (Cohen, 1962: 9). On the opposing side, Ben Bennani insightfully notes that “unless a translation achieves status as canon, it must undergo periodic rebirth” (Bennani, 1981: 136), a 1 position Allen Tate echoes in his 1970 International Poetry Festival lecture with the following contrast: “unlike literary criticism, which translations somewhat resemble, good translations are never obsolete” (Tate, 1972: 5). Inexplicably, though, in a round-table discussion published in the same slim pamphlet in which this lecture appears, Tate goes on to say regarding various renderings of Homer’s Odyssey: “it seems to me translations have to be redone all the time” (Tate, 1972: 16)! Nor is the rationale for retranslation always cogently set forth, although in almost all cases the argument regarding the viability of a subsequent rendering is linked to the primacy of contemporary TT poetics. T. S. Eliot, for example, in his querulous “Euripides and Professor Murray,” laments in this vein that “Greek poetry will never have the slightest vitalizing effect upon English poetry if it can only appear masquerading as a vulgar debasement of the eminently personal idiom of Swinburne” (Eliot, 1964: 73). Without invoking the complicated question of intervening models, John Felstiner writes more broadly: “In most cases, the idiom of translators goes staler sooner than that of other writers, so that ideally, the salient poets from any period deserve retranslating for the ear of each new generation” (Felstiner, 1980: 17). This assertion, too, may reflect a widespread agreement on the matter, but is short on explaining just how this “staleness” comes about. Jean Boase-Beier does better to pinpoint one likely cause, but cannot generalize her insight to all retranslations. “Some translations do date,” she affirms, careful not to offer a blanket observation. “But they are much more likely to be those that try to mimic for the target language audience the supposed effects on the source language audience. Those that concentrate on making the original as visible as possible are not more likely to date than the original itself” (Boase-Beier, 1999: 12). On this same topic, in contrast, Barbara Folkart largely eschews the foreignization/domestication debate with a gloomy pronouncement about the ambit 2 of literary translation as a whole: “The reason most of the literary ‘classics’ have to be re- translated, generation after generation, while the originals endure,” she avers, “is that (untrendy as it may be to say so) many translations are inferior to the originals, as texts. For one thing, translations are not always held to the highest standards of artistic creation for their day…” (Folkart, 2007: 135). Translation Studies likewise stands divided on the question of which translation of a literary text among two or more might serve its ST better/best. Walter Benjamin famously opined that “important works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the time of their origin,” an interpolation in putative support of a literary ST’s eternal Nachleben (Benjamin, 1992: 73). Jacques Derrida’s turn on this subject follows Benjamin’s: “every first translation…is imperfect and, so to speak, impure. It is imperfect because translation defectiveness and the impact of ‘norms’ appear often heavily, and it is impure because it is both an introduction and a translation” (in Berman, 2009: 67). Meredith Oakes, on the other hand, in specific reference to the potential pitfalls of archaizing drama translation, counters these assertions with the belief that “the only translation that really might last is the one that is written close to the time when the play is written” (Oakes, 1996: 287), a position Holmes, too, espouses, but with a twist: I think there is one exception to this need for new translations. Sometimes translations which are almost contemporary to the original can last. For instance, I don’t think any of us would want to read a nineteenth-century translation of Rabelais, but I think the seventeenth-century translation in English is readable in the same way as the original. Translations either have to be contemporary with the original or contemporary with us, and nothing in between satisfies, although this is not always the case. There is a Dutch translation of Whitman contemporary with Whitman, and the 3 Dutch is absolutely unreadable. The Dutch language has changed so much over the past hundred years that in this case the translation is absolutely unuseable. (Holmes, 1993: 120) Then again, Felstiner hazards this opinion based on his reading of Ángel Flores’s earlier versions of Pablo Neruda: “possibly the early stage of translating a poet is inevitably marked by too much fealty: word-for-word or sense-for-sense renderings that stop short of exploiting the translator’s own tongue” (Felstiner, 1980: 16-17). On this point, Isabelle Vanderschelden at first appears to disagree but, approaching the question from the angle of TC assimilation, oddly comes to concur, writing: “first translations often have the function of introduction, and therefore tend to favour, in Lawrence Venuti’s terms, a ‘naturalizing’ approach, which aims at reducing the distance between the original and the translation, thus making its reception in the TL easier… it is significant that re-translations tend to favour a more literal rendering of the original than first translations; this can be perceived as a ‘movement toward the source text’. Once a text has been introduced in a given TL culture, it seems to become more possible to re- translate it in a more ‘foreignizing’ way (Venuti’s term)” (Vanderschelden, 2000: 1155). The Ethical Question in Retranslation What critical writings about retranslation consistently do proffer is a circumambience of ethical observation. Ethics has been in the fore again of late in Translation Studies, proposing ideals for operational standards that far surpass such practical (and simplistic) rules of thumb as that of faithfully following contemporary methodology to the best of one’s ability and the like. Concerns seem to cluster alternately around questions of hegemony and literality. Since at least the 1990s, as such foundational anthologies as The Translation Studies Reader attest, Lawrence 4 Venuti, Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and others have in various ways advocated counteracting English-language dominance through strategies of resistance that flout textual fluency, the translator’s invisibility, and the cultural homogenization of all ST discourses into a contemporary American idiom. Antoine Berman similarly declares that “the ethical act consists in recognizing and receiving the Other as Other” (in Pym, 2010: 104), while elsewhere broaching issues of method in stating: “The translator has every right as soon as he is open” (Berman, 2009: 75). Willis Barnstone concurs with Berman’s view regarding the moral status of unconventional (read “non-literal”) renderings, writing that “[t]here is no deception, no false expectation, as long as the method of transformation is named and acknowledged” (Barnstone, 1993: 85), and Kathleen Davis neatly subsumes both these approaches in the following statement: “A translation is a responsible response only if it answers both to the general laws guiding and safeguarding interpretation of the text and to that which is singularly other within it” (Davis, 2001: 93). Literary translators may find Peter Newmark’s recent pronouncements on translational ethics more at odds with current methodologies. Basing his views on the 1948

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